16 July 2015

C. Namwali Serpell’s Seven Modes of Uncertainty has roots in her observation that while she found great pleasure in the experience of not knowing what’s really happening in a book, she hated feeling uncertain in her life. Seven Modes is an attempt to draw the uncertainty we recognize in stories into relation with the familiar uncertainty of life, and to consider whether literary uncertainty could perhaps help us understand how to actually live with the anxiety of not knowing.

Serpell argues that literary uncertainty affords diverse modes of experience with aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions, and that it emerges over time from a reader’s shifting responses to complex structures of conflicting information. Think of the destabilizing feeling of a shifting point of view, of hearing the same story from a different perspective, or of a scene repeating until what seemed normal grows dream-like, uncanny. She uses readings of books by the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, and Tom McCarthy to show that novels are “structurally suggestive,” affording readings that in turn afford ethical experiences, positive and negative.

Fairly or not, this study of how literature can influence by disrupting what we think we know is itself given a hint of uncertainty when one learns that Serpell herself is actually a decorated writer of fiction. Indeed, this month her short story The Sack won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, awarded annually for outstanding English-language short fiction by an African writer. The Caine, which has been described as the African writing equivalent of the Booker Prize, carries a £10,000 award, a sum Serpell opted to share with fellow shortlistees Segun Afolabi, Elnathan John, FT Kola, and Masande Ntshanga. Serpell described the decision as an act of “mutiny,” and showed the capaciousness of her concern for structure in explaining that choice to Huck magazine:

Maybe it’s because I’ve been teaching about mutiny that that word is so present to me. It came from a sense that the prize itself is structured like a competition. Prizes are often competitions, but this particular prize brings the shortlisted writers together for a week before the ceremony. We did panels together. We did readings together. We hung out together. We drank together. We ate together and we talked about our families and our work.

When you spend that much time supporting each other, it felt horrible to be pitted against each other. You could feel the difference in the atmosphere when we would all be talking and hanging out and a stranger would come up and say: “Good luck,” or “Who do you think is going to win?” Suddenly the tenor would change. It’s so uncomfortable to be asked to compete with your friends. Writing to me has never seemed like a competitive sport.

The more I thought about it, I figured the reason the prize is structured this way is because of the money. The money has to go to one person and for people to be interested, we have to drum up this sense of drama. I thought instead of attacking the prize, which is a wonderful thing, I’ll go for the source of its structure, which, for me, seemed to be the money.

In the BBC Africa “Masterclass” video below, produced to mark Serpell’s Caine Prize win, she describes the power and possibility of short stories:

Readers can perhaps look forward to further ethically productive uncertainty at Serpell’s hand: she’s at work on a novel.

12 June 2015

Like set pieces of life, duels and their drama have starred in Western literature for centuries, a history presented by John Leigh in the newly-published Touché: The Duel in Literature. “Writers are drawn to duels,” Leigh explains, “in the interests of discovering something fundamental about human beings and the way they variously organize and delude themselves, the way they face one another, their fears, and, ultimately, death.” Fiction’s many famous bouts have helped the duel to sustain a cultural heft resonant of both honor and absurdity, able at a mention to evoke intense and complex emotions of a nature known to every era, as Leigh shows below.

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In the weeks before last month’s General Election in Britain, politicians had begun to look bored by their own campaigns. The Premier League had already been won, the royal baby was refusing to appear, and the weather was dull. Suddenly, however, a challenge to a duel was made public, and a nation stirred. Yanek Zlinski, who was identified by the media as a Polish “Prince” (the application of the scare quotes has yet to provoke any further challenges), had invited Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), to cross swords in Hyde Park.

The proposed duel, of course, never took place. But Zlinski had made his point. He wished to suggest that UKIP’s stance on immigration, which comes largely from the poorer nations of Eastern Europe, constituted an affront rather than an argument and did not deserve to be dignified by opposition in dialogue. Furthermore, by challenging the Englishman to a duel, he intimated that Poland remained a no less honourable member of old Europe, enjoying with Britain a common allegiance to a cosmopolitan aristocratic culture.

The stunt would indeed appear to hark back to noble traditions of political antagonism, when campaigns (honouring the etymology of that word) would take politicians out onto the field in order to sort out their differences. Of course, the opposing sides in the House of Commons are still separated by the length of two swords. Yet this direct appeal to one of the party leaders may actually be a symptom of the Americanisation of British politics, for television debates, recently introduced into the UK after considerable debate about their form, appear to have encouraged the electorate to envisage leaders as more presidential personalities.

Vendler begins The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar with an account of her life as a critic, from childhood enthusiasm to sharpened focus and an urge to write, and from early-career impediments to the “free rein, unlimited space, and genial encouragement” of William Shawn’s New Yorker.

With the Gazette Vendler touched on such topics as her early dissatisfaction with the teaching of poetry:

In my student days, it was common to assume that the poem makes a statement — that it’s protesting war, or is grieving a death. My teachers, on the whole, didn’t see a poem as an evolving thing that might be saying something completely new at the end because it had changed its mind from whatever it had proposed at the beginning. I was sure you couldn’t sum it up propositionally: You couldn’t say, as it was common to say, “What is the meaning of this poem?”

Her fascination with the development of individual poets:

My mother had brought back from the bookmobile a biography of Hopkins which quoted many of his poems. I began to read Hopkins with great elation and memorized much of what I read. I wrote what was supposed to be a 17-page high school senior paper, only it turned into a 40-page essay. [Laughter.] I think it was my first book. And it gave me my first taste of critical competence: by then I knew everything Hopkins had written — the letters, the sermons, the devotional writings, the biography. It’s not a big corpus.

It was exhilarating to write at length from knowledge of a single poet’s complete works, since anthologies offer only little snippets. I very soon grasped how rewarding it was to write on a single poet. I’ve never written on themes except as elements in the changing explorations of a poet, the evolution of the author’s poetics from the early juvenilia all the way up to the end.

And sustained need to consider the work of each alone:

I can understand poets only one by one: They are too idiosyncratic to be lumped together.

Each book had a polemical purpose: to declare that Yeats’ “system” had powerful poetic implications; to argue that Stevens’ long poems were not “ponderous and elephantine”; to contest the belief that Herbert could be appreciated adequately only by a faithful son of the church; to show that Keats’ odes had been insufficiently well read, and were in fact interconnected as a series; to assert that Shakespeare’s sonnets, all 154 of them, not merely the famous ones, deserved individual commentaries; to offer an alternative to the Irish political criticism that had neglected Heaney as a poet; and to suggest that Dickinson’s harsher and more difficult poems could, and should, be read by a wider public.

It’s a hallmark much evidenced in The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, which includes readings of longtime Vendler subjects Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, along with consideration of Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Ford, and more.

24 January 2014

The term “semantics” has a number of different meanings, several of which seem to be completely at odds with one another. This state of affairs is often a source of considerable embarrassment in dealing with our students, to whom we find ourselves having to explain that our discipline is a bit like the country where some people call “red” what others call “white” and vice versa. With the result that, every time we use the word “red,” we would have to assign it a superscript or subscript number, specifying that we mean “red1, in such and such a sense.”

Still, although the term “semantics” may have a number of meanings, those meanings are less irreconcilable than might at first appear.

In 1883 Michel Bréal (Les lois intellectuelles du langage: Fragment de sémantique) defined semantics as the science of meaning, but when he came to publish his Essai de sémantique in 1897 he gave it the more general subtitle Science des significations, and only in chapter IX, in which he proposed to examine “by what causes words, once created and endowed with a certain meaning, are induced to restrict, to extend, to transfer this meaning from one order of ideas to another, to raise or to lower its dignity, in short to change it,” does he say “it is this second part which, properly speaking constitutes Semantics or the Science of Significations.”

Semantics, then, is the science of meanings, but, for Bréal, only insofar as they are subject to historical development. And this is not all. Each time Bréal has to deal with the meaning of a word he proves incapable of isolating it from the set of enunciates, or more extensive fragments of text, in which the word appears. To give but a single example, in the chapter on the laws of specialization, Bréal is less interested in defining the meaning of the French word plus than in the fact that it takes on different meanings in different expressions.

The notion of semantics, then, is born, historically speaking, in reference to that imponderable entity we label meaning, but only to a lesser extent is it concerned with the meaning of words, or, to put it differently, of terms in isolation. For this, what was needed was not a science but an empirical praxis, lexicography in its most hands-on sense, that is, the actual compilation of dictionaries. Still, we must not forget that the whole of lexicography is simply the description of a langue, and therefore of an abstract entity, and not of the practical use of parole by means of which the speaker “means” something.

17 January 2014

A central participant in twentieth-century American literary, intellectual, and political life, Malcolm Cowley is perhaps best known as a chronicler of the “lost generation,” literary editor of The New Republic, and the critic who resuscitated the moribund career of William Faulkner. Cowley’s long writing life was marked by engagement with some of the major cultural and political moments of the American century, and his many correspondents included Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, cummings, Tillie Olsen, Ernest Gaines, and John Cheever. The Long Voyage, new this month, collects around 500 of his letters, including the one below, in which Cowley—tasked with writing on American literature abroad—queries Mrs. John R. Marsh (aka Margaret Mitchell) on the foreign market for Gone with the Wind.

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August 7, 1945

Dear Mrs. Marsh:

The last chapter of “The Literary History of the United States,” which I have the job of writing (I mean the chapter, not the history) is supposed to deal with the influence of American literature abroad since 1900. And a great deal of that influence is centered in Gone with the Wind.

“The Literary History of the United States” is a big symposium planned to take the place of The Cambridge History of American Literature. [. . .] The contributors will include most of the distinguished professors of American literature in American colleges. I don’t know what I’m doing among all those long gray beards, but there I am, and I’ll try to make the best of it. The contributors took me in, like an orphan on the doorstep, because they thought I knew more than they did about American books abroad. I do, but there’s a lot of research to be done before I can write the chapter.

I am writing you now, with a cry for help, because it seems to me that the reception of Gone with the Wind is the biggest single phenomenon in the history of American literature in the rest of the world. I should guess that you would prefer not to have the subject discussed in the big magazines, or articles would have appeared already. But this scholarly symposium, this history of American literature, is a different matter—a matter of historical records that ought to be complete—and perhaps you could find a few minutes to answer some questions, from your own records.

What I should like to know is:

In how many foreign countries has Gone with the Wind been published?

Into how many foreign languages has it been translated?

What (if they aren’t a secret) have been its approximate sales in Great Britain? In France? In Germany before the war? In Sweden? In Argentina?

(Less important)—when was it published in each of the six countries listed above?

[. . .]

I ran into some facts about Gone with the Wind in France that might interest you. Jean-Paul Sartre, the best of our new dramatists, explained to me its special wartime popularity. “The Germans allowed it to be read,” he said, “because [they] thought it would make the French dislike the Yankees. But it didn’t have that effect at all. The reason the French read it—devoured it, you might say”—I’m translating freely—“was that it gave a picture of another occupied country that resisted the invaders. They drew strength from it.”—Jacques Schiffrin, who is André Gide’s friend and publisher, gave the highbrow French verdict on Gone with the Wind. He said to me, “Now confess—it’s better than Dos Passos, isn’t it?” Dos Passos having a very high standing among the French highbrows. Peter Rhodes, a young man who works for the Office of War Information, reached Lyons with the first American forces. He found copies of Gone with the Wind—worn secondhand copies—selling on the semi-black or gray market at 3,500 to 4,000 francs per copy, depending on their conditions, from $70 to $80 at the official rate of exchange. I hear that new copies of the “limited” edition sold for $100.

06 January 2014

We often describe the topically or thematically linked books we publish as being in “conversation” with each other, as if our library turns tea party after hours. Of course, it’s the authors responsible for the works who actually animate those interactions, and late last year we invited two of them to engage one another more directly. In The Work of Revision, published last summer, Hannah Sullivan reveals iteration in literary production to be an inheritance bequeathed by modernism, with close and complicated ties to the advent of the typewriter. In his forthcoming Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew Kirschenbaum casts a roughly similar gaze on the rise of word processing software. The two were kind enough to allow us to listen in as they discussed affinities between their work in a weeks-long email exchange; what follows is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.

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Matthew Kirschenbaum: Hannah, in The Work of Revision you identify the typewriter as central to the practices (or call them poetics) of revision you read as characteristic of high literary modernism through the composition habits of figures like James, Woolf, and Eliot. For me this grounds your argument not only in the space of literary and textual criticism, but also conversations in media studies, including the technologies of writing and even what is increasingly known as media archaeology. How do you walk the line between attentiveness to the material particulars of the medium—which extend beyond the typewritten page to the ecologies and economies of inscription that surrounded it, whether James’ dictation or the stratification of the writing process into autographs, typescripts, proofs, etc.—and the slide into technological determinism?

Hannah Sullivan: Hi Matt, Yes, the typewriter is definitely a key part of my book. But I must emphasize how medially diverse the twentieth century was. The material documents I studied include many things besides typescript: notebooks, manuscripts, different stages of proof (Joyce’s proofs for the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses are notorious), serial printings, and first and subsequent book editions. Most of the writers I study continued to draft and compose by hand, but they revised and rewrote (also usually by hand) on very different kinds of pages.

And there is quite a bit of idiosyncrasy. In the 1900s, Henry James dictated new material to his amanuensis—he had given up writing—and then corrected typescript (sometimes including aural mishearings) before seeing proof. The revision process isn’t always linear. But when he revised his earlier fiction for the New York Edition in the same decade, he was working from reproductions of his earlier published novels, pasted up with a specially wide margin for revision. Another example: in The Waste Land facsimile, we can see Eliot looping back into new composition by hand on the typescript, not a fresh sheet of paper.

We are extremely pleased to join a whole host of collaborating institutions in announcing the launch of the Emily Dickinson Archive, an open access website collecting high resolution scans of most of Dickinson’s extant poems.

While Dickinson is one of literature’s most loved, it’s perhaps not widely known among her legions of admirers that she did not publish in her own lifetime. Given her tendency to write multiple variations of poems—and her embrace of esoteric punctuation—generations of Dickinson scholars have debated interpretations and transcriptions of her manuscripts. The site now allows both scholars and casual readers alike to see the originals for themselves, absent the layers of mediation added by their posthumous publication.

At the Emily Dickinson Archive readers may browse Dickinson’s manuscript pages by first line, date, or recipient, or search across the full text of poem transcriptions. Readers can also refer to past editors’ transcriptions and use the site’s tools to create their own transcriptions, annotate images, or zoom in to look closely at Dickinson’s handwriting.

In the video below, EDA General Editor and Houghton Library Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie Morris introduces the site and some of its features.

05 April 2013

Lu Xun (1881-1936), considered by many to be modern China’s most important and influential writer, was passionately engaged with the events and debates that marked the nation’s path to revolution. Though after death his legacy was mobilized by Mao and his followers—Mao himself referred to him as “the sage of modern China” —Lu Xun never joined the party. Instead, as Gloria Davies shows in Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence, he grappled with the tensions that defined his era but remained a humanist deeply committed to the ideal of empathy. Below, Gloria Davies describes Lu Xun’s profound impact on the Chinese language, and the challenge of honestly reading the work of a writer whose legacy has never not been politicized.

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My initial intention in writing Lu Xun’s Revolution was to let the essays of his last decade speak of the age in which they appeared. The more immersed in them I became, the more his language demanded continual contextualization, and the contextualization, in turn, led me inevitably to dwell on the modern Chinese sensibilities that he and his contemporaries helped to shape and define.

The result is a book that revolves around the intricacies of Chinese sense-making at a time when, under the myriad intertwined effects of war, politics and commerce, the nascent modern written vernacular, baihua, became at once creative, fluid and highly manipulable. That this language also became increasingly menaced by doctrinal utterances and slogans was a key reason for Lu Xun’s involvement in the polemics that dominated his later years. Like a large majority of educated Chinese, he saw the Communist cause as the best possible hope for a more equitable and just society at the time. However, while he professed admiration for the many true believers he befriended, whom he praised for risking life and limb on the nation’s behalf, he also loathed Communist ideologues, perceiving in them a hunger for fame and power that posed a real threat to true revolutionary change. The same ambivalence is reflected in his conspicuous avoidance of issues concerning party discipline and obedience.

Lu Xun complained that his adversaries had succeeded in wasting his time and energy “that could have been better spent on doing something of real worth.” His posthumous elevation as Mao Zedong’s revolutionary writer of choice ensured that his writings, and his characteristic defence of human empathy and intellectual independence, suffered a complicated fate. To unravel some of that complexity is an important aim of this book and all the more important because Lu Xun’s influence on the Chinese language, as it is used in the People’s Republic, is considerable.

Indeed, precisely because Lu Xun’s legacy is formidably entangled, a degree of patience on the reader’s part is essential. China’s party-state has never ceased to rely on Lu Xun as a source of moral authority, turning him into its perpetual “helper” (bangmangzhe, to recall one of his favourite disparagements). At the same time, critics of the state have also always invoked Lu Xun as an exemplary conscience. Today, disgruntled citizens are fond of quoting Lu Xun to express their own frustrations with life under one-party rule.

Few observers could fail to note the contrasting responses to Mo Yan’s honor this year and to Liu Xiaobo’s in 2010, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Whereas in 2010 the Chinese government denounced and boycotted the award, this time the state has proudly received the honor, even announcing plans to spend $110 million making Mo Yan’s home village a “Culture Experience Zone.”

Two years ago my people gave a prize to a Chinese, and in doing so offended the Chinese government. Today they gave another prize to a Chinese, and in doing so offended the Chinese people. My goodness. The whole of China offended in only two years.

Link, a co-editor of No Enemies, No Hatred, our recent volume of Liu Xiaobo’s writings, and author of a forthcoming inquiry into the workings of the Chinese language, An Anatomy of Chinese, outlines a series of recent statements and actions which have contributed to wide disappointment in Mo Yan’s politics. For his part, Mo Yan asks that his writing be allowed to exist apart from his extratextual political positioning. While acknowledging the complications of any such compartmentalization, Link points to the larger question of “how and to what extent a writer’s immersion in, and adjustment to, an authoritarian political regime affects what he or she writes.”

Link notes Mo Yan’s focus on society’s downtrodden, the “poor farmers who are bullied and bankrupted by local officials,” but contrasts his attention paid with that of dissident writers like Liu Xiaobo and Zheng Yi. “Liu and Zheng,” Link writes, “denounce the entire authoritarian system, including the people at the highest levels. Mo Yan and other inside-the-system writers blame local bullies and leave the top out of the picture.”

Link also highlights Mo Yan’s libidinous “black humor,” the characteristic most often lauded by his supporters, but points to such writing’s usefulness to the regime for its obscuring of the past and its function as a “safety valve.” Link cites Liu Xiaobo’s 2004 article “The Erotic Carnival in Recent Chinese History,” excerpted here from No Enemies, No Hatred:

11 December 2012

After a remarkable life of playing, thinking, and writing, the great pianist and polymath Charles Rosen passed away this week at the age of 85. Our relationship with Rosen stretches back nearly twenty years, and includes the publication just months ago of Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature. The essays and reviews Rosen chose for this last book deal largely with the tension between the freedom of interpretation and the requirements of fidelity, the need to balance the necessity of respect for the “identity” of literary and musical works against our desire to be free from coercive readings. That freedom, he wrote, “provides the basis and the guarantee of the pleasures of reading, listening, and performing that justify the existence of the arts.”

What follows is excerpted from the book’s Introduction.

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We might all agree that a knowledge of the historical and biographical circumstances that saw the production of a work of literature or music or even an analytic study of them may often help us to a greater understanding and to the increase of pleasure that comes with understanding. Nevertheless, one brute fact often overlooked needs to be forced upon our consideration: most works of art are more or less intelligible and give pleasure without any kind of historical, biographical, or structural analysis. There are always some aspects of the work which do not need our critical industry or demand much interpretation. All that is necessary is just some small familiarity, acquired however involuntarily and informally by occasional experience with the stylistic language and tradition of the work.

In the end, we must affirm that no single system of interpretation will ever be able to give us an exhaustive or definitive understanding of why a work of literature or music can hold an enduring interest for us, explain its charm, account for its seduction and our admiration. A recognition of the inadequacy of any system of interpretation is essential to our being able to gain a fresh experience of the work. We need at times to acquire the talent of reading a work of literature or listening to a piece of music with innocent eye and ear, untainted or unblocked by critical studies, a state of objectivity unrealizable in all its purity, but which may be approached. Every fine work has inherent merits easily grasped across the ages and effective in alien cultures, merits that cannot always be convincingly shown to have been imposed by historical, social, or biographical pressures. At the moment of its creation, a work will have different roles to play, different functions to fulfill (some of which we ignore or deliberately set aside), and will develop still new roles and functions as it grows old and passes through history. A piece of Mozart or a poem by Pope for example, both carries and conveys a sense of the age and the society in which it was created, and yet at the same time it can speak directly to the sensibility of a modern listener who has little knowledge of the original historical context. Merely a nodding acquaintance with the style and language of the time will generally be enough, and this acquaintance may be superficial and still effective. A study of the historical conditions in which the art was created can of course deepen our understanding and make it more complex and even increase our delight, as I have remarked at the opening. But the study is rarely absolutely indispensable, the individual interpretation never exhaustive or permanent. Every critical approach is likely to obscure important aspects of a work that will enter into the experience of a naive reading, Any appreciation of the past must acknowledge that several different critical approaches are valid, and that even in the absence of any formal system of interpretation, the work may still speak to us simply through its intrinsic merit or value.

In [Freedom and the Arts], I have tried not only to benefit from a variety of different critical methods, but above all to keep in mind that listening and reading with intensity for pleasure is the one critical activity that can never be dispensed with or superseded. This will allow us to recognize the multiple possibilities of significance, and to avoid appreciating only those elements of an artistic production that are revolutionary; both Theodor Adorno and Glenn Gould, for example, were incapable of seeing that Mozart was sometimes astonishingly effective and superior to most of his contemporaries even when he was extremely conventional, not only when he was most strikingly original.
And to recognize that Mallarmé, who permanently altered the nature of poetry, was nevertheless right when he claimed that he was only doing what all poets had done before him. While a study of the sources of Montaigne’s ideas will reveal his debt to the stoic, epicurean, and skeptic philosophers, only a rereading of his essays for the enjoyment of his style and his delight in contradicting himself will tell us that his conclusions are generally provisional and that the interest for the reader lies in the voyage and not in reaching the goal—or, rather, that the voyage (the demonstration of the way the mind works) was the real original goal all the time.

The freedom of interpretation is fundamental to the tradition of music and literature in the West, which continuously demanded innovation, but an innovation that would eventually—often with some difficulty and delay—be assimilated and absorbed by the tradition, which has often, indeed, more influence upon the character of the art works produced than the personal and historical circumstances at the moment of their appearance. Nevertheless, the freedom of interpretation is balanced by a requirement of fidelity—that is, that the identity of the work be preserved and remain coherent.

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The Harvard University Press Blog brings you books, ideas, and news from Harvard University Press. Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.